“THE HOLLOW MEN”

A Film By Alister Barry, Vanguard Films, 2008

In Wellington, early in August 2008, when the National Party’s Conference launched its election campaign, the Leader, John Key, set the tone by announcing his intention to be a compassionate conservative. Eight years ago George Bush used the same phrase at a similar stage of his political career. It doesn’t seem smart that Key would choose to parrot the slogan of the most reviled US President in living memory, a man whose record suggests anything but a compassionate nature. Why would Key opt for Dubya as a role model? If you see this movie, you’ll know why.  

A week earlier Key had said that a National government would retain Labour’s Working for Families initiative. The PM-in-Waiting explained : “These are families with mums and dads who are working long hours, trying to get by on a modest wage in the absence of tax cuts under this Labour government. We don't want to make life more difficult for them” (28/7/08, www.tvnz.co.nz). Anyway that was the position as at the end of July. Not long previously Key had been adamantly opposed to the programme, which he knew to be imposing “Communism by stealth”. Those reds were still under the bed, but you don’t expect a putative Prime Minister, not a Nationalist one famed for his success as a money trader, to succumb so meekly to creeping commies. What next? A Key alliance with North Korea? Or was it Key’s try at defining “compassionate conservatism”?

Key Has A Problem With Universality

Key has explained that he was opposed to Government programmes including the middle classes. He supposes that it’s wrong to treat people equally. Key has a problem with the principle of universality, the ethic that everyone deserves a healthy childhood and a secure old age, the ethic that built our roads and railways, our schools and hospitals. It used to be called the Kiwi way, which was neither creeping nor commie. So some time in July it must have been explained to Key that the people who had been middle class welfare bums were more diplomatically - and compassionately - perceived as families with mums and dads who are working long hours. You’re more likely to get a vote from Kiwi battler mums and dads than from a commie. 

Key’s misunderstandings are not as crass as his public remarks suggest. You don’t have to be as smart as a currency trader to work out that those Kiwi mums and dads swim in the mainstream, as defined by Don Brash. Key knows that there’s a contradiction at the core of his party, but he hopes that we aren’t paying attention to the details. He has to. This is because the one law for all rhetoric of Brash was an expression of a basic premise to which National has always appealed, but they assume that supporters realise it’s a code, not to be taken literally. Brash and Key can’t say what they really want to do, which is to shrink government in the interests of corporate wealth, because, if they did, National would never make it into office. They believe in one law for all only when it suits their partisan needs. By its own words, National is not concerned with the national interest.

Nicky Hager ’s original book came out in November 2006. It showed us how the National Party was being guided by some dubious public relations (PR) lads in Australia and secretly supported by a rich cult, the Exclusive Brethren, an outfit whose very name indicates its hostility to an inclusive national interest. Of course not all the private agendas coincided. But all concerned had a mutual, if tacit, understanding of what was not wanted. That’s why National’s policy was best left unexpressed, and its inspirations had to remain anonymous. Hager exposed the result. His account was irrefutable because it wasn’t his story. He only uncovered what the Nationalists themselves did and said (see my review of the book “The Hollow Men”, in Watchdog 114, May 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/03.htm, for an analysis of the Brash e-mail saga).

The date is significant because it coincided with Don Brash’s resignation as National Party Leader. Brash had been under duress for some time, but the publication of “The Hollow Men” hastened his departure. To illustrate the story Hager has teamed up with director Alister Barry. It’s a happy partnership, uniting NZ’s best investigative reporter with a filmmaker of outstanding integrity. Two years on, it might be thought, we’ve read the book, do we need to see the film? It’s not like shooting a novel with its visual and interpretative aspects. In movie foyers people talk about whether they prefer the book or the film. How do you do that with a pile of e-mails? Hager and Barry have solved any such questions superbly. We see details which weren’t in the book. Some scenes and conversations are necessarily dramatised, but there are shots here suggestive of moles beyond the mystery of the e-mails themselves. Rather than being redundant, the film is complementary, enriching.

Spin Doctors Advised Brash Not To Tell The Truth

At this stage, the hollow men were wheeled on. It was explained to a reluctant and initially uncomprehending Brash that he’d never get elected if he told the truth. The advertisers had to design the “product” and “package” it. The “perceptions” of consumers (those persons formerly known as voters) had to be manipulated by “images” until they were induced to have an “emotive gut reaction” to the message. According to Hager and Barry, on the eve of the caucus poll incumbent Leader Bill English enjoyed a one vote advantage. The next day Brash won by one vote. One MP had switched, the State house boy from Bryndwr, the currency speculator himself. John Key had been offered the position he wanted in a Brash Cabinet.

We see Brash undergoing what was to become the torture of constant and sceptical interviews. Wasn’t his programme Rightwing? He was ready for that one. It was intended to be a curly question, but the Leader swatted it. “I’m not sure what Leftwing and Rightwing mean”, the good doctor opined. “There’s a difference between right and wrong”. Good one, Don. Reactionaries often serve up this line, which would have been well spun in advance. The conceit of the times is that we inhabit a post-political world. In his August 2008 Keynote speech the new Leader made much of his “pragmatic” approach. Ideological questions, the very ideological theory goes, have been settled. History has ended. There remains only the need for administrative efficiency. In their own estimation those who are beyond politics are beyond pettiness and prejudice and the Leader need concern himself only with helping us all prosper by restraining wages in our One New Zealand. There is a less selfless consideration. Conservatives have to take the politics out of politics because they know that their ideology is unpopular. So Don Brash could have been echoing the usual expedient smartarse rhetoric. But give him credit. All we know about him suggests that he believed what he said. To him, there is but one correct way, and that is classical economic orthodoxy. If he was right it was no more than an admission that “right” means “correct” and “correct” means “not wrong”.

This sort of non-ideology can best be described as creeping Marxism. Karl Marx, whose analysis was as integral to Communism as Crosby/Textor’s is to Nationalism, held the view that, come the revolution, the old problems and conflicts, the old ideologies, would be rendered obsolete. As in the Brash-Key vision there would be no need for divisive talk of class conflict. Like Brash and Key, Marx contended that once his side had won the State would wither away to a merely administrative function.

Brash was a neo-liberal rather than a neo-conservative. Neo-libs believe the State should set up rules so that big corporations effectively make policy. Then the now unnecessary Government need not interfere much at all with individuals’ lives. Neo-cons, by contrast, are socially conservative. We see a man from the neo-con Maxim Institute complaining that the Civil Union Bill was going to remove any distinction in the law between various couples living together. To a liberal like Brash his private take would have been that’s the way it should be. As his careful words in Parliament suggest (captured in the film) he came to inoculate himself against the outrage of the religious Right only reluctantly. Like the neo-liberal Young Nationals we also see, Brash took his opposition to the “nanny State” seriously.    

Hager and Barry tell the story of National’s notoriously clever ads. In his earnest, boring way, Brash lit up at the Iwi-Kiwi billboard. In his eyes those seven letters conveyed more than neo-con racist resentment. Brash saw Government intervention, any Government intervention with the potential to affect pure contractual relationships, as just wrong. He would have been frustrated that his opposition is still seen in cultural terms. To neo-liberals what’s wrong with the Treaty is that there should be only World Trade Organisation and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-type treaties. The National campaign brilliantly, because effortlessly, united what could have been disparate elements within its natural supporters.

There’s a great vignette of a particularly fierce Kim Hill asking Brash about his first speech at Orewa (Orewa 1). Doubtless mindful of Margaret Thatcher’s assertions that there is “no such thing as society” (or perhaps National’s idea that there’s no such thing as a nation), there being only individuals and families, the formidable interviewer suggested that treating people as discrete individuals might destroy a culture. Knowing he had to stay on message, aware that the ground where he was being invited to tread was as slippery as a gangplank, and certain that the lefty Hill hadn’t a clue about the market economy, Don looked bewildered. Two incompatible moralities looked at each other. For a moment, before the TV silence demanded to be filled, there was nothing more to say. 

It seems that one of National’s main spinning tacticians is Matthew Hooton. He told Brash that to go up in the polls he needed to make big bold moves. That would enable future initiatives. A gradual or incremental style, Hooton advised, would make the leader a “prisoner of caucus”. This is very much in the familiar style of Roger Douglas, whose purposes were the same as those of Hooton and Brash. The new Leader’s apparent naivety on his first day would have been an attempt to seize such a revolutionary moment.

The Orewa Speeches

Hence Orewa 1, the stated concerns of which had little to do with the real agenda of either spinner or spinnee. But Brash was soon floundering, unable to give specifics of Maori privilege. “We need”, said Richard Long, another spinning Nationalist, “to come up with a credible holding answer”. And what about superannuation? Should they take the Communism-by-stealth or the Kiwi-mums-and-dads line? National should “appear to support a tangible fund out there which seems to give people more comfort”. Always the tone spins between condescension and contempt.

The film looks again at Dick Allen, a Reagan insider now seasonally resident in Central Otago. We learn that Allen was pushing for a better deal for landlords, private hospitals and tobacco transnationals. Hooton is chuffed that having Allen as a mate means that National might be able to prostate themselves before Allen’s “close friends, Rumsfeld and Cheney”. Hooton wanted to suck up to the two most bloodthirsty neo-cons in a bloodthirsty Bush White House.  For a very detailed article on Richard Allen, see Peace Researcher 24, December 2001, “Covert Warrior Comes Out Of The Cold”, by Dennis Small, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/covert.htm. Ed.

Most things in Republican America and its satellites never change. Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s disgraced Vice-President, used to prattle on about the “nattering nabobs of negativism” who dared to hold a different view to the Commander in Chief. The hollow men go on about lefty, pinky criminologists, psychologists and the chattering classes. Nationalists have always affected this sort of know nothing rhetoric. The generals might often be neo-libs, but the privates, who might go for this stuff, are neo-cons. 

Orewa 2, law and order, was meant to appeal to women and the old but it brought no change in the polls, probably because it was aimed at the same voters who had already moved after Orewa 1. The next big topic, welfare, did induce a National recovery. But Brash was tiring of the constant mothering, the concessions which were turning him into a eunuch : Labour Lite. He wanted frank, sensible talk about controlling inflation and all that, but the doctors kept inoculating him. He asks : Do you want me to lie? No, of course not, he’s soothed, but the Leader needed to appreciate that his “policies are not widely enough shared in the community to win an election”.

Rod Deane, an original neo-lib, was another who was running out of patience with all the drippy talk. He too had to be nursed. He had to accept that the message needed to be more “nuanced” than the actions that would follow (see Watchdog 113, December 2006, for Jeremy’s review of Michael and Judith Bassett’s “Roderick Deane : His Life and Times’, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/13/11.htm. Ed.). 

The film never argues its case, allowing the witnesses to incriminate themselves. National had swallowed the dead rats of retaining some public assets and some progressive taxes. It had stopped opposing superannuation, four weeks annual holidays, the Civil Union Bill and Kiwibank. Hager and Barry could have added yet more examples of the Party acceding to Labour policies that they had vowed to oppose. Interest-free student loans, KiwiRail and subsidised early childhood care come to mind.

Learn From Bush

Hooton recommended the locals learn from Karl Rove, George Bush’s main strategist, whose advice had been to target an opponent’s perceived strengths. So it was that we heard doubts about Helen Clark’s integrity and complaints about her “arrogance”. In the US now, as John McCain flails in the search for a credible gambit, someone - guess who? - has told him to attack Barack Obama for being .... “arrogant”. 

Rove was bad enough a teacher. But worse even than Rove is David Horowitz. Hooton has told National to ape Horowitz’s idea that an effective election campaign was one that stirs up “anger, fear and resentment” in those mums and dads. Horowitz is a lone ranger extremist, his strings pulled by very rich - and very Rightwing - foundations. The puppeteers like him because they can present him as a former deluded radical youth who has seen the light. Horowitz, an attention seeker, relishes extravagant gesture. In his revolutionary days, for instance, white, Jewish David became a Black Panther. He likes bold grassy knoll conspiracies.   

In the course of an insightful comparison between Horowitz and the king of conspiracy theorists, Joe McCarthy, blogger Aaron Barlow noted that the times have been right for the paranoid style : “George W Bush, long ago zeroed in on by Rove (who was searching for the perfect candidate), is the type of politician Horowitz was also wishing for when he wrote his 1998 pamphlet “The Art of Political War” (later incorporated into “The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits”) which was distributed widely among Republican operatives in 2005.... In this screed, Horowitz wrote :

‘“In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability....Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of daily life’. Bush was a perfect mix, able to present the veneer of a ‘compassionate conservative’ while never shying away from the attack politics which both Rove, who endorsed the Horowitz pamphlet, and Horowitz partake of’” ( www.publiceye.org, www.huffingtonreport.com).

In December 2007 Horowitz reported that a conservative student was beaten up by leftists because he opposed legalising same sex unions. Although the incident was proved to be an invention, Horowitz has resisted calls to withdraw his claim ( www.mediamatters.org). Observers of the paranoid style consider that “it was Horowitz who actually codified lying, making it into a tactic rather than just a careless mistake”.

Because they more readily evoke panic in an audience ready to be manipulated, Horowitz favours issues to do with personal and sexual morality. According to Horowitz “Jerry Springer and all his guests” are forcing America “at the point of a gun” to adopt liberal (i.e. evil) ideals of social justice. Horowitz is unhinged. It’s unlikely that he has expertise in any of the topics upon which he rants, least of all economics, but he does know he is compelled by “a single patriotic idea : ... private property, individual rights and a limited State”. Any connection between that sentiment and the sentiments revealed by the hollow men’s e-mails is entirely not coincidental. 

Hooton has told the Nats that this crazy is a reliable guide. The observation Barry includes, that undecided voters are “inherently self-centred”, is pure Horowitz. Are they Kiwi mums or dads battling a bruised economy (Key 2)? Or are they dupes of godless Communism (Key 1)? Whatever. The important thing is that the next New Zealand government’s policy makers think that the people of New Zealand are lazy, dumb and selfish. Mums and dads are just angling for what they can get for themselves.

Poor Brash. Ultimately he’s a comic figure. He had a safe multicultural line to use : “My wife’s from Singapore”. Beyond pleasantries, though, it was never easy. Keep on message, he had been told. You’ve been inoculated against the disease of a clear and honest foreign and defence policy. Repeatedly asked whether it had been a good idea to attack Iraq, Brash kept trying to raise his taxation talking points. But he’s no Winston Peters. All he could do was repeat that Iraq was “no longer relevant at all”. It used to be that National politicians evoked foreign wars centuries past to validate their prejudices. Now an ongoing war - it’s still going on, post-Brash - was as dead as a swallowed rat.  

With no foreseeable new crisis affecting NZ, and certainly not one on which the main parties would differ, it’s a sure bet that National’s going to ignore all foreign policy. A recent column by Hooton has complained that previous watershed debates like Vietnam and the Springbok Tour “are not the issues of the future”. What’s worrying Hooton is that “we have only one serious multinational” and that will condemn us to becoming a mere holiday destination, with resorts for foreigners, surrounded by shantytowns for the locals; a bigger version of Fiji. Australia... will not look kindly on another ‘’MV Tampa’ off its coast with four million people on board” (Sunday Star-Times, 27/7/08. The piece was a weak riposte to a strong Chris Trotter column. Despite these remarks, the hollow men are guided always by Treasury policy, so it should be noted that Treasury in fact advocates exactly what Hooton claims to want to avoid : NZ’s becoming a cheap-labour offshore island for the Aussie economy. See my review of “At The Crossroads : Three Essays’ by Jane Kelsey, in Watchdog 100, August 2002, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/00/07.htm).

Dog Whistle Issues

A Key government, in other words, will probably be big on a few obvious dog whistling issues like law and order. Otherwise the Government will restrict its interest to lowering taxes on the rich, privatising what’s left unprivatised, talking up its “free trade” fire sales of the country’s infrastructure - and then cutting corporate taxes again. They won’t say that they intend to preside over “MV Tampa”. Brash wanted to stay an honest man. His political failure was brought about because he never found it easy to play the facile games that come so easily to successful politicians. He never enjoyed dissembling. We’re shown a commentator’s headline greeting the Brash accession. Brash had been a “classical liberal with a social conscience”. Fair enough, but his defences were too soon eroded for history to offer a sympathetic verdict. Brash’s final election pitch emphasised how “trustworthy” he was. It was the Exclusive Brethren who had urged a demagogic Trust/Distrust motif on National, indicating that beyond Brash’s self-aggrandising smugness lay a more serious moral failure. His last words as a contender to be Prime Minister were put in his mouth by a cult so far from his cherished mainstream that they regard social contact with the rest of society is sinful. That’s exclusive all right. 

Slyly, throughout the film, we see Rodney Hide. He’s there apparently at all National events, looking on, confident that his mates will enact the full neo-liberal agenda for which his Act Party exists as a revolutionary vanguard. The film has an unobtrusive feel for the machinations at play, the fruit of long observation. Brash’s early advice had been to leave talk of the important item, tax cuts, to Hide. Out of options, Key wants to talk of nothing else. What this landmark film shows us is that the elusive Key will turn out to be as pure a neo-lib as Don Brash and Roger Douglas. As the transparent Brash complained, in all sincerity, what would be the point of getting into power if you really had to abandon everything you want to do? 

Alister Barry , one of the founders of Wellington’s Vanguard Films, is well known to CAFCA. We have been working with him since he asked our help to research the early 1980s’ TVNZ series on New Zealand’s Vietnam War, which he scripted. In the mid 80s we worked with him on “Islands Of the Empire”, the definitive study of the US/NZ military relationship (that film remains relevant today, having been most recently screened at a Wellington fundraiser for the three Catholic peace activists charged with deflating the Waihopai spybase dome in April 2008 – that’s appropriate as Alister has also filmed Waihopai protests); at the end of the 80s he came back to Christchurch to work on Vanguard’s “Rebels In Retrospect”, a study of the Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement (from whence both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign ultimately sprang) of the 1960s and 70s. In 1985 CAFCA hosted the world premiere of “Islands”, in Christchurch; in 1996 we did the same with his “Someone Else’s Country”. For Jeremy Agar’s review of his “A Civilised Society” (on the education “reforms” of the past two decades), see Watchdog 115, August 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/15/09.htm and for my review of his “In A Land Of Plenty” : The Story Of Unemployment In New Zealand”, see Watchdog 100, August 2002, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/00/07.htm. Alister was also a 2003 and 04 judge for the Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand. He is an old friend of ours, one of the country’s best documentary filmmakers and a national treasure. Ed.

“ARSENAL OF HYPOCRISY”,

A Film By Randy Atkins, 2003

The title of this disturbing documentary is a play on the US’s role, during World War 2, as the “arsenal of democracy”. The phrase was intended as a compliment as it was American industrial capacity that armed Britain when it was fighting alone against Nazi Germany. And of course the good guys went on to win. By converting “democracy” to “hypocrisy” the filmmakers, themselves Americans with an intense knowledge of their country’s Government, are crediting their audiences with a historical perspective they might not always have. As the reference assumes (though George Bush has done all he can to discredit it) American power is still regarded by many as essentially a benevolent influence. This is in large part a residue of the War and the years immediately after. 

The wordplay is a neat, succinct jibe, one that his film more than justifies, and it’s not the fault of Bruce Gagnon (the film’s presenter and spokesperson for the US-based Global Network Against Weapons And Nuclear Power In Space) that the allusion might pass some by. The content he is presenting might be similarly challenging to audiences with but a cursory understanding of American state policy. The immediate charge of hypocrisy is levelled at any and all US administrations since 1945. Gagnon is looking at space policy, making the point that all post-war American administrations have assumed the need to control space and, thereby, Earth.

Put baldly like that, the accusation will strike some viewers as overwrought. If so, the “Star Wars” imagery we see will reinforce an assumption that Gagnon is exaggerating, that he can present his contempt for his country’s leaders only by a selective use of the evidence. This would be a pity. Although the American drive to rule space has received less attention from the world’s media than it merits, there are more than a few other reliable observers who have been making the same point for decades.

The DVD came out five years ago, but it is not in any way dated. In a sense, it’s better to look at it now than it would have been in 2003 in that during the intervening period we haven’t been able to see past Iraq and Afghanistan. It was around the time that Gagnon produced “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” that Bush was launching his arsenal of deceit. Bush was no hypocrite : he lied to justify his wars. Meanwhile the militarisation of space has continued, with no essential change from the decades before Bush came into office. Had the doco been released now, audiences might have found it hard to think past the specifics to do with Dubya, whose follies could have been a diversion. These days Bush gets demonised as an individual, but unlike some uniquely Bushian aspects of American “defence” policy, space policy has not essentially changed.

The specific hypocrisies underlying space policy are that the US says it wants nuclear disarmament, when in fact it wants nothing less than to give up its own nukes. It suggests it has to keep its nukes in the meantime to police the world, when their real purpose is to threaten the world. The drive to dominate space is motivated in part by the need to use space as a launching platform. Reagan’s Star Wars programme of the 1980s, so named because it seemed more sci-fi than science, was not the fantasy that our wishful thinking supposed. It is more accurately seen as a stage in an enduring policy. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the stated need for all the space shields and weapons has gone, but the programme hasn’t. It just took another form under a new name. That’s been another hypocrisy. 

Gagnon starts his story with Werner von Braun, the man who used concentration camp labour to build Hitler’s rockets. In 1945, American and British troops entered Germany from the west, while Soviet troops entered from the east. As strategists wondered where the eventual boundary would lie between the two emerging big power blocs, the US and Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists, who enjoyed a mystique in both Washington and Moscow. The Cold War had begun even before the hot war had ended. It did not matter that many of the scientists were Nazis. To some cold warriors in the West this was in fact a good thing as it proved their anti-communist credentials. 1,500 Nazis were smuggled into the US. Von Braun ran the US space programme, but he was only one of several top men with dubious backgrounds.

US Wants To Be “Master Of Space”

From the start the idea was to “conquer, occupy, keep and utilise space” so that the US would win “the third world war”. The motto “Master Of Space” was chosen to inspire what would now be called a mission statement. America must at all costs have “the ability to deny others the use of space”. Gagnon discusses the seminal Vision For 2020, which set out the strategic context. Because of its dominant military and economic position at the War’s end, the US did not need to fear a potential rival - not if it consolidated its advantage by taking over space. Neither the Russians nor anyone else could pose a threat. But sometimes, because the threat of an external enemy is a great fundraiser, it had to be pretended that they did.

The justification for first going into space, and then, militarising it, was rationalised in terms which foreshadow the more recent analyses of outfits like the American-dominated World Bank and the International Monetary Fund : “The globalisation of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’”. The Vision For 2020 anticipated that “accelerating rates of technological development will be increasingly driven by the commercial sector”. Military policy was an extension of economic policy, and economic policy was to establish neo-liberalism around the globe.

Despite the hypocrisy that bangs on about how the rising tide of American power lifted all boats (a remark of Kennedy’s), policy makers have always known what has become so obvious in our new century : that the touted “free market” economies would lead to increased inequality, and, with it, increased regional instability. That, Gagnon explains, is why, whether or not there is a Soviet Union, space remains important as a place from which to spy. Every country being either a potential rival or a potential trouble spot, it’s safe to assume that we’re all being watched.  

How Reagan would love being still around now that his Star Wars has become technologically possible : the purely military aspect of wars, the destruction of the enemy’s ability to retaliate, can be achieved almost entirely from space. The trick, which Gagnon thinks is now in place, is to destroy any potentially hostile missile while it’s still on the ground or, at worst, as it takes off. He dubs Gulf War 1 as Space War 1. The second space war was Kosovo; the third, Afghanistan. Since then of course we’ve had Gulf War 2 (Space War 4). Reagan could hope only to erect a barrier in the skies. 

To buttress his case, Gagnon could have looked at lots of White House and Pentagon think tankers. His choice of Zbigniew Brzezinski is apt. Brzezinski advised Jimmy Carter, the 1970s’ President whom Republicans like to pretend was wimpy. From way back in the 1960s’ Kennedy era and since, Brzezinski had been one of the main Cold War strategists. He operated at a time when the notion of detente (the hope that the nuclear warriors could have a cuppa) made occasional appearances. Whenever it did, Brzezinski would panic. Ever eager to arouse tension, he crafted Presidential Directive 59, which committed the US to a nuclear war-fighting stance. This was quite an achievement in that there remains doubt as to whether he consulted either the President or the Central Intelligence Agency. It was Brzezinski who insisted that the US needed to blur the boundary between nuclear and so-called conventional weaponry, thus making extreme violence more thinkable. It was Brzezinski who insisted that the US had to push for a military advantage whenever and wherever opportunity arose. In characteristic vein he once told an interviewer that “it’s inaccurate thinking to say that the use of nuclear weapons would be the end of the human race. That’s egocentric thought” (quoted by Fred Halliday, “The Second Cold War”, Verso, London, 1983. See also “With Enough Shovels : Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War”, by Robert Scheer, Random House, New York, 1982).

Post-Gorbachev (i.e. after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the world is supposed to be a different place, yet Brzezinski’s pronouncements have moved neither ideologically nor geographically. Gagnon mentions a book called “The Grand Chessboard” in which Brzezinski detects two global “collision points”. One collision point is central Asia and the “Stans”, next to the oil pipelines running through Afghanistan. The other hotspot is the coast of China. Developments since the book came out in 1997 indicate that Zbiggy is still influential. Gagnon’s other point is also as relevant as this month’s news. The US wants to control space as it is a potential source of minerals. A NASA scientist is seen predicting that there will be mines on Mars by 2025. When, in July 2008, TV pictures showed the probe on Mars, the reporter repeated exactly that. According to Gagnon, Congress had before it a bill to make space profits tax exempt. If so, then America wants to privatise the universe in its own interests. 

That’s why this film might seem too Darth Vader, too bad to be true. Because it has so much to say, and so much background information to provide, “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” is intense in both tone and content. It’s essentially a lecture with the odd shot of a rocket or the Moon, interspersed with Gagnon’s talking head mate, Noam Chomsky, himself an uncompromising critic. As an unremittingly harsh dissection of US policy, “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” has the potential to dismay the popcorn brigade. As an analysis of global insecurity, it’s essential viewing.    

Global Network Against Weapons And Nuclear Power In Space, Box 652, Brunswick ME O4011, USA, globalnet@mindspring.com http://www.space4peace.org

“THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR”

By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Allen Lane, Victoria, 2008

All figures are in $US. Ed.

Joseph Stiglitz is well known as the former boss of the World Bank who criticised the increasingly extremist policies of his successors. Stiglitz wrote as a Keynesian (John Maynard Keynes, the highly influential 20 th Century economist, whose followers in governments throughout the West practised a mixed economy of the State and the private sector. Ed.), that is, as a moderate capitalist of the type that used to be the norm, so it’s worth noting that his analysis of the world’s Rogernomes, while scathing, even radical in tone, is in fact conservative. That’s how far the neo-liberals have taken us in the wrong direction, how far from the old orthodoxies. Stiglitz’s targets, the globe’s Bushites, hold unprecedented power, not least over how we view the news. Bush and his pals have destroyed many an innocent reputation; they would like very much to destroy Stiglitz’s credibility. They’ve been vicious, but they haven’t landed a glove on him (see Jeremy’s review of Stiglitz’s “Globalization And Its Discontents”, in Watchdog 105, April 2004, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/05/10.htm. Ed.).

This is because his credentials (in their eyes anyway) are impeccable. And because Stiglitz would assume that any gap in his defences would be exploited, he’s at pains to be cautious. The logic in this book is simple, its numbers are restrained. It would be easy, and equally valid, to add zeroes all over the place. So when Sitglitz says that the US war on Iraq has wasted three trillion dollars, he’s just adding the immediate sums and assuming best case scenarios. He’s wise to do so, but he’s probably understating the costs. The present war, already the longest ever fought by the US, has killed probably 150,000 Iraqis. It’s forced over two million to emigrate, and created about 2.2 million displaced, internal refugees. Others have died from illnesses directly caused by the war. Stiglitz estimates that by 2010, the total of dead Iraqis, from all causes, will have reached one million.

As an American economist, however, Stiglitz’s focus is domestic policy. Before the invasion, the American public was assured that it would be a breeze. This was doubtless in part one of the conscious lies that had to be told to “justify” the war. It was also an expression of that deadly mixture of military arrogance, technological brilliance, tactical stupidity and evil that we have been witnessing at a so far safe distance for seven years now. Bush’s economic adviser (Stiglitz held down the equivalent job for Bill Clinton during his 1992-2000 Presidency) offered the most sober advice : he thought the war would cost $200 billion. The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, came in with $50 billion. His Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, thought that there would be no bill to pay at all because any money spent on killing people would be made up for by oil revenues. No worries, especially as it could be financed by loans so that no one would notice. The idea was to let future generations pay for the carnage. It needs to be recalled that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are key members of the cabal who set the Bush Agenda (see my review in Watchdog 112, August 2006, of “The Bush Agenda : Invading The World, One Economy At A Time”, by Antonia Juhasz, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/12/08.htm).

Use Of Mercenaries A Partial Privatisation

According to Stiglitz the actual price of the war has been $400,000 per troop, and total US warfighting costs to date are $845 billion. The numbers have been inflated by the Rumsfeld policy of contracting out the war. Blackwater, a mercenary privateer which has been accused of random violence, pays up to $1,222 a day. You have to offer big bucks to get people to take the risk. Compare that to an Army sergeant, who earns $50-$70,000 a year.

Stiglitz notes that “[t]he use of contractors (a euphemism for mercenaries. Ed.) is, in essence, a partial privatisation of the armed forces. Yet there are good reasons why nations do not privatise their military. It makes sense for governments to privatise steel mills; or even to privatise natural monopolies like electricity or gas, provided regulatory frameworks are implemented to make sure these monopolies do not use their market power to overcharge consumers” (for the antidote to Stiglitz’s enthusiasm for privatisation, check out the written, and audio material from CAFCA’s March 2008 Privatisation By Stealth Conference, which can be read and listened to online at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/index.html#Privatisation. Ed.).

Stiglitz goes on : “It does not make sense to privatise the military. Proponents of privatisation often argue that it encourages customer responsiveness... For the most part, those who interact with military contractors do not do so voluntarily; there is no market where they can choose to be integrated by a contractor from the United States, or by some other provider. Indeed, the incentives are perverse. The incentives of the contractor are to minimise his costs, and those incentives do not take into account the nation’s broad range of public objectives”.

Profiteering, Corruption, Overpayments, Taxpayer Subsidies

“The extensive use of contactors raised still another problem : the potential for profiteering and corruption is high. Allegations of overpayments to Halliburton, the defence contractor formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, are well known, but this is the tip of the iceberg. “....Whether they are giant corporations like Bechtel or General Electric or individual security guards who can earn $16,000 a month in Iraq, contractors are driven by making money. It is unrealistic to assume that they will be motivated by the same concern for the public interest as civil servants or soldiers. The current system relies on civil servants to manage contractors and hold them accountable but they’re not trained or resourced for this. Facing little competition, the big firms will be less efficient. Once firms win big contracts - often using low-ball initial costs estimates - the Government becomes so dependent on their services that it’s almost impossible to get rid of them”.

Stiglitz looks at “sole source bidding” and “cost-plus” contracts. These are a long tradition in Pentagon circles, where the big contractors are routinely enabled to tack on a fixed percentage for however much they spent. This invites price gouging, corruption and inefficiency. Within the State Department there are apparently a mere 17 staffers overseeing compliance for $4 billion worth of contracts. At this stage in his narrative Stiglitz notes that from 1998 to 2003 Halliburton gave over $1 million to the Republicans and was granted $19 billion “worth” of contracts. The bottom line, we might agree, is that the “contractors’ interests ran directly counter to America’s national interest”. 

The extremist neo-liberal ideology which Rumsfeld imposed on the Army - analysed in detail by Juhasz in her book - has also inflated the charge to other Americans. The strategy of waging a “just-in-time” war compounds the tendency to skimp on present investments while adding a larger, later invoice as the real - and invariably higher - costs need to be met. Similarly, Stiglitz says that a strategy of “cash” accounting rather than the conventional “accrual” method (which allows for the real long-term spend) has been introduced to baffle public scrutiny. Some war items are included in other budgets. And so the venality goes on. And on. The actual current operating costs of the American war in Iraq for the average American household work out to $138 a month.

The US government forces its taxpayers to further subsidise the war profiteers by paying the contractors’ very high insurance premiums ($780 million a year). The Government pays if a casualty results from an “act of war”. This alone, Stiglitz calculates, will come to $3 billion of taxpayer largesse. It’s a familiar gambit in corporate circles. The public takes the risks; the privateers get the rewards. Inevitably, constantly, the Bushites opine that “the successful prosecuting of the war would be good for the economy”. This version of a familiar superstition emanated from Bush’s economic adviser. Unlike the neo-libs and the neo-cons, Stiglitz has a sense of history. The popular myth that wars spur civil development stems from World War 2. In that very specific context, military spending helped end the Depression. Otherwise, Stiglitz notes, “money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain : had it been spent on investment - whether on plants and equipment, infrastructure, health, or education - the economy’s productivity would have been increased and future output would have been greater”.

As a Keynesian, this is basic to Stiglitz’s world view. To the Bushites, the equation of waste with responsibility is a necessary lie. The rest of us, innocent of Beltway sophistication, have always known that killing, bombing and torturing is wasteful. Let’s just say that it’s not rocket science (it raises the point that the Depression could have been ended sooner had the world’s governments invested in their people. For most of them, though, this has never come easy). The fashion with Establishment economists is to ignore social and economic factors. Cost-benefit analysis, as this distortion is called, has allowed the Pentagon to omit from its numbers burdens borne by those who aren’t the Government. An example : a relative of a wounded soldier might quit work to be a caregiver. “These costs are very real - but hard to quantify”.

Iraq War Biggest Cause Of Skyrocketing Oil Price

How much of the increased price of oil results from the demand created by the war? A lot, Stiglitz thinks, it’s more of a factor than China’s industrialisation. In this passage Stiglitz develops his Keynesian precepts. Beyond the spending itself are the costs that result from not spending on alternatives. To borrow a popular notion from the economists, war money “crowds out” peace money. Were expenditure to switch from bombing schools in Iraq, say, to building schools in the US, the gain would be more than humanitarian. Just as destruction inflicts thousands of small and unrecognised costs so does domestic investment spin off benefits. It has what economists like Stiglitz call a multiplier effect. Stiglitz’s astonishing yet sober conclusion is that the total impact of the economics just of oil, what has happened because of diversions to the war from productive capacity, is that it has in itself cost the domestic US economy at least $3 trillion. That’s $US3,000,000,000,000. 

For all its thorough and specialised knowledge, the central thesis of Stiglitz is accessible. We all know that if you’ve got some money put away, it keeps growing all by itself. We all know that once you can’t pay off the credit card or meet the rent, the interest can get out of control in no time. Bush has made it a point of principle to put off the bills. The national US debt, its (dis)credit card bill, is vast. The war-related parts of the Bush budget deficits will balloon to over $2 trillion, the interest on the loans will soar. As military experiments crowd out other research, longer-term investment is down. Stiglitz thinks that up to $5 trillion in “forgone output” has been lost. The cumulative, spiralling losses are permanent. The annual income of the average US family is $500 less than it would have been - forever (and if Iraqi dead were costed at the same rate as US dead, the country’s waste would be valued at $8.6 trillion).

“I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the President that I’d privatise Iraq’s businesses”. Thomas Foley, one of Dubya’s agents, was responding to a comment that his assiduous selling of Iraq’s public assets was illegal. The occupation, with its “Bush Agenda” alienation of Iraq’s infrastructure, while profitable, was also debilitating. “Foley and others like him failed to realise that, until Iraq  was stabilised, anyone buying its assets would pay bottom dollar and then try to strip them, rather than sticking around to actually do business and invest in a dangerous country” (the asset stripping of NZ’s now renationalised railways being the textbook example among the numerous privatisations in this country. Ed.). “And just when Iraqi firms needed the most help, the effect of US policies was to expose them to free competition, with zero or very low tariffs. This was something that American industry would never have tolerated. The policies had the predicted effects. There has been very little foreign direct investment outside of oil, and many businesses could not compete with the flood of imports and so shut down, resulting in even higher levels of unemployment”.

Those That Ignore History Are Condemned To Repeat It

Stiglitz concludes by observing that some measures of international opinion rate the US as a greater threat to peace than North Korea; that Iraq is seen as the world’s most corrupt country - except for Somalia and Burma; that Iraq, once the most stable and secular country in the region, has descended into religious and ethnic chaos; that the US is frittering away its global authority. And every failure was foreseeable.

Why do they keep doing it? Don’t they know that wars never finish the way the belligerents planned? Corporate need drives American aggression, but there are other reasons why elite opinion in the US is unique among the liberal democracies in its readiness to back a war. Since its struggle for independence and the Civil War in the middle of the 19 th Century, America has been spared. It was last invaded (by the British) in 1812. US casualties in the two world wars of the 20 th Century were heavy enough, but, compared to European and Asian losses, they were light. World War 2, the conflict that still shapes the thinking of the generations which set policy, is generally regarded as a “good war”, the war that rebuffed the Axis. More, it set in motion the investment in a ravaged Europe that made the US the globe’s economic powerhouse. 

When George Bush was a boy smiling GIs were still dispensing chocolate and nylons to a grateful world. By all accounts Bush is an incurious man, bereft of historical perspective, so when an advisor came up with “Axis of Evil” to apply to his enemies, he loved it. He might well really think that places like Iran and North Korea are direct descendants of the original Axis, that they pose the same threat as had Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan. He might assume that his occupying force in Iraq should be as welcome as the GIs that he used to read about in his comics. His term is almost over, but the possible succession of John McCain, who appears to endorse the whole Bush foreign policy, means that the world might have to endure at least four more years of imperial folly.